The state of the Linux community

Stop hatin' start participatin'. Here's a usually-Dedoimedo-styled pretentious but honest article discussing the difficulty of running profitable business in the Linux world, and how a joint community monetary effort can really help. If you ever so much as remotely like Linux, you should carefully read this. Otherwise, we are going to lose.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-community.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

i get what you are saying and have whitelisted your site.
i used to run a small website from my own pocket but i wondered how i could sustain it if it ever became popular.
bandwidth is not free.

i have contributed money to different distros and projects in the past.
i also just purchased the Humble Introversion pack.

people all like a free ride but nothing in life is really free.

 

Thank you. Nice Article.

 

its pity linux community is lazy when it comes to money this is serious we need get good donations so save it but also new innovative ideas to increase support for money developers and blog writers and think about giving best to community.

but we need good sales person who sell their talent in term of money or give alternative ideas to support community financially


one of my idea is like you said i guess you should add in your site promote kickstarter like project to help some developers so people can back them

also lot of people dont have paypal accounts so we need centralize money transfer where people can fund or transfer to certain bank account via other alternatives like credit card ......paycheck wire transfer bank transfer ....lot of other options

i think time has come you should make a legitimate funding origination where people can back and send money continuously

also i agree geeks dont like sponsors or advertisement but its very much needed in terms of money community need so understand that as well

also graphs like this are adorable

http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php


also i like your idea very much of yearly/monthly fix light funding scheme where we can give advance checks or wire our bank to withdrawal certain fix amount without scar of over withdrawing

best to do this is i guess Since dedoimedo sells like hot cake you should start bonds or insurance policy scheme where we buy dedoimedo LINUX Bonds with penguin photo on it

helping Linux community policy and we give little as 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, 1000$ bonds yearly according to our pocket or fix as well flexible 5-20 years policy bonds or membership kinda thing i hope you get my point

we humans are lazy and run 90% time autopilot even in charity what we really do is give donation 2-3 times to charity origination and then become member or something to keep it on autopilot system

we connect to some NGO charity org and give when yearly little fix checks or payments so can be lazy without worrying about it much so if this autopilot safe money transfer system starts in linux community it help a lot to community



Hope you get my point and start some autopilot membership scheme

with funny names according to donations

celeron members , p4 members, dual core members, quad core members, xeon sever, supercomputer

or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi

Ranks of Dedoimedo Jedi membership team

or

new innovative


also you can sell linux community help bonds yearly with donations members name printed on it and amount of donation

 

Not All Ads Are Blocked:

Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

 

Thanks for letting know!
I just enabled that option.

 

good idea.

maybe also put a small banner on the site asking visitor to disable ad blockers to support the site.

 

Well, the Free Software Foundation already accepts donations and has membership dues, although it looks like they do more activism than software development.

Where exactly would the money go? Were you looking for something distro-specific, or would it go to a particular project like the kernel or a DE? With the way things are splintered I'm not sure how you decide who gets what. It could be controversial if some of it ends up going to Ubuntu, for instance.

 

Strongly agree with everything said above

 

yes agree nobudy decides who gets what it should be public polling system to help people for new innovation in Linux field also those who are contributing a lot by blogs ...correcting errors of developers by critics all these require lot of expertise time and some funding to pay servers bills .....other expensive and for their time and devotion towards OSC (open source community)

you see lot of sites who does software testing like antivirus firewall they do is manipulation to make A product better then B in open source no such things people do

Example:

Mrk

http://www.dedoimedo.com/

He genuinely help by creating true reviews what they seems to be positive and negative of that opensource giving new ideas and positive negative feed backs to linux community and developers which is very important not only for user but developer too

they do lot of help for newbies who want to learn or use linux other tutorials


so my point is what we can do to help in return in terms of money so they work freely

writing blogs without worrying about expensive


you see H-online site close everyone said oh its should not such a good site but no one come forward to support the expenses to run it smoothly

so what my point is we make some very very little contribution as 10$ to 50$ yearly which we all can afford without getting pain in @$$

and get just 10000 to 100000 users to donates we save few good sites

 

This is not about me ... this is about the wider community.
Projects that we use and love, Linux distros, etc.
Mrk

 

yes sorry i know i just put you here because you are very famous here

but there should be some centralized system one good site which support funding to at least 5-10 other good popular sites thats all i wanted to say

 

I guess I'm about to throw a lit match on a can of gasoline, but here I go. The Linux community is in its state for a lot of reasons. For one thing, the number of distros at any one time is just stupidly high, and the vast majority of them don't go anywhere because there aren't enough serious, funded devs out there to do the work properly and keep it going. Funding is a huge issue, and it isn't going to be solved by pleading for users to donate. Donations just cannot sustain projects like these long term and users generally aren't donators. Even Ubuntu isn't safe from funding issues. Right now Canonical is purely funded by Shuttleberg alone, out of the money he got for the certificate sale a few years ago. They still are not a profitable company, and companies don't live on hope and ideas alone.

Linux is also still suffering a bad reputation from the older days when software, games and drivers would either run like crap or not at all on Linux. Those who aren't Linux fans probably haven't kept up on Linux developments over the last 2-3 years, and Linux still does present issues in a number of areas, even in fricken 2013.

The community itself, the user base represented on a good portion of help forums can still have that same old toxicity they always have had as well, and that does not help newcomers to Linux whatsoever.

Last, computing is changing and the idea that Linux will eventually be a popular desktop OS is long gone. Hell, even Windows is feeling the heat as iOS and Android take over. If the move to mobile is beating Windows to a pulp, imagine what it's doing to companies like Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Mint and PCLinuxOS. If they aren't on mobile devices or on servers, they're being left in the dust. Redhat and those like them have absolutely nothing to worry about, but the home distros have a ton to worry over.

As to the original article and its suggestion..it's a pipe dream and nothing more. The only way Linux will remain funded, let alone profitable is through contracts with corporations and, as Ubuntu has started trying to do, advertising revenue, which is an entirely different problem itself and not one likely to be solved anytime soon.

 

Yeah, I have to agree. Donations aren't going to save anything or do squat. In order for a linux distro to be good enough to compete against Win in the marketplace it has to have major quality effort put into it, and that usually means big money. There is just no other way. People aren't going to sweat over something for nothing... they need to get paid.

 

Am I missing something? I've been using linux for 8 years and it's constantly been getting better...Also people like valve\steam are jumping on board. More and more people are jumping on the band wagon than ever before.

Sure money would help(just like anything), but linux has been doing well so far? Looks to be gaining ground to me...

What am I missing?

 

You're missing the fact that it's market share is still near zero....

 

@Kerodo
Isn't the market share increasing??


Linux is competitive... otherwise it wouldn't exist..
donations not effective? Look at linux as a whole, since 1991 and also linux mint+others.



I just don't get why people suddenly think its in a bad state... windows 8 is a complete failure, at-least currently.



By design open source (imo) will be succesful, proprietary like apple and windows will not be able to keep up with all of the new hardware at some point when they reach a threshhold... where as opensource can be worked on by anyone and there are no limitations..

 

Some people have been claiming this for years and years, but I think the reality is, desktop linux market share has not increased much at all. I don't have numbers, so I may be wrong, but I don't think so.

I'm using it now myself because it suits my needs, but I don't think it'll ever become mainstream.

 

Market share has kept steady and insanely low for years now (desktop) and nothing is moving it. Linux is in no way, shape nor form "competitive", it simply enjoys that tiny, but loyal user base. Here is the most recent results according to one source: http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0. It's going nowhere. Those distros with deep pockets can stay afloat a long while, those without, well, distro closures happen daily. Donations aren't effective because you have to have a large percentage of people donating large amounts of cash, or every single user donating a buck or two just to cover normal costs, let alone seeing any profit.

Open source means jack to survival, it simply means others have more insight and, sometimes, control over what code gets in and can often see and report mistakes/make things more efficient. I'm not sure where you're getting this idea that MS and Apple can't keep up with hardware developments...I'm guessing you've missed the past issues with Linux and hardware. If anyone can keep up, it's the proprietary corporations..unless you're expecting an overnight influx of Star Trek: The Next Generation tech?

Anyway, as I said earlier, Linux overtaking or even keeping pace with the competition on desktops is a fantasy that isn't even worth discussing anymore. The hope is gone. Servers and mobile is its only saving grace, and in reality that's quite fine. It still has its place.

 

see this only one month starts

http://blog.linuxmint.com/

we can do for year for blog writers

A total of $6349 was raised thanks to the generous contributions of 265 donors: if same amount rise of blog writers it help lot of people

i dont see any big deal in it

 

Yeah, Apple is in the unique position of deciding exactly what hardware will (officially) be running their OS, so naturally they won't have as many issues with drivers and such. I'm sure MS gets a lot of cooperation from their OEMs as well. Linux doesn't get anywhere near the support from hardware manufacturers, although again that comes back to market share.

Having said that, I'm not sure anyone is under the impression that Linux can somehow compete in terms of numbers. I think the OP's suggestion was more about improving it in general or even just allowing it to survive, even if it remains relatively unpopular. I'm not sure if I even want it to be popular, as it could then be a bigger target for malware authors.

 

I might be way off here, but I get the feeling that this has nothing to do to Linux not being competitive, but to the fact that people get freaked out about using open source software. And by this, I mean software that is apparently built for free and built by a scattered community, and not a centralized software maker. Most of the times, and for a lot of situations Linux is perfectly usable, but people still have too little trust in it.

 

hi
Tks for your article.
It is difficult to find serial profitable business in the Linux World.
Even if Red Hat, Debian, Fedora CentOS are used in many campanies.
There is here and there admin. services for them, a few producs, paid distributions...not enough to push Linux from confidential to industrial use...

Rgds

 

The problem with Linux is that it is arcane, unfriendly, not logical, not easy enough to learn or use for most ordinary people's everyday needs. On top of that, there is a snob "elite" element on many Linux forums that make it difficult for newcomers to ask questions without scorn. The Linux language is appalling and counter intuitive. Things remain complicated once you get "under the hood" of many of these "distros" past the geeky egocentric frontages. Most people don't want to spend ages just finding out the basics to get things to work and find their way around the operating system. A good operating system should run like a pen that you can not feel in your hand.
There are very difficult choices to make before ever even starting Linux. It is not easy to know what is possible using the operating system (even Windows suffers from this to a great degree) and most users end up, understanding little, just doing a few things and are limited by this.
Regarding adverts and their "god given right" to be in front of our eyeballs every day.
I hate (in fact loathe) unsolicited adverts of any kind and the internet (which has great potential for the benefit of humanity) is being turned into a commercially driven branch of hell by unscrupulous, insidious exploitation of every human need, hope, dream, nuance, idiosyncracy, preference and fear for $ profit.
There has recently been a spate of gimmicky money raising schemes for "worthy" "projects" and some that arrived early to the trough have seen some monetary benefit but I believe that people will become tired of this ploy like those charity street collectors that play the moral blackmail/flattery/ coquettish, manipulation game. First they catch your eye, you might stop once but leave feeling used, next time you cross the street to avoid them and then eventually you start to despise them for their unrelenting, clown like, machine persistace.
Here is the big thing, you shouldn't try to put a $ tag on everything
I think software developers are at their best as enthusiastic hobbyists with an interactive enthusiastic relationship with there followers and the software defined and limited by those interests. Nowadays we are surrounded by garish, monolithic, monsters that are more "ornament" than "use", all hype and no action.
The reason that software developers do not make money is because software is too expensive for easy purchase and wide useage and in an uneducated attempt to counter this, software producers move into combat mode, making enemies of the consumers in the process to sell their overpriced commercially distorted wares to an unconvinced "market". They use every marketing ploy, bulk (bloat) it up, make it "Pro" version, constant upgrade, rentware/leaseware models, over advertise the product, make fake misleading reviews and grandiose claims about it and then panic when they get caught out by the discerning public who can see straight through this ill thought out strategy. Maybe it's time to dance to a different tune?
People are getting numbed out and want to be sick in a bag when they here these "heartrending" tales of struggling developers trying to make an honest buck just to feed the wife and kids and the same goes for advertising on websites. Without the acceptance and interactive relationships with consumers and enthusiasts these softwares and developers are nothing and can achieve nothing and "bully boy" or sneaky or underhand commercial stategies that are usually annoyingly transparent and at best become overnight tired and clichéd nags and a complete mood killer and burden are not going to make things any better.

 

So you think contributing to projects like Mozilla, LibreOffice, Linux Mint is not something that should be done?
Mrk